Philip Womack reports from the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica, where
you can hear poetry on the beach and bump into your favourite authors

Lightning flashes in the black sky. A woman poet reads, while the audience whoops and yells. Phones chirp merrily; a long, dopey dog patters up and down the central aisle. Fans flutter like hummingbirds. In England, a literary festival involves polite applause, measured questions and retired teachers clutching thermos flasks. But here, on the southern coast of Jamaica, it means something open, free and – despite the efforts of the first three poets, whose subject matter seems to revolve mostly around fruit – totally seductive. The Calabash Literary Festival, in its ninth year, is taking place on Treasure Beach. If this weren't enough to make it stand out, it is also entirely free.

***

On the beach there are hundreds of plastic chairs. As the day progresses they fill up and visitors sprawl on the floor. Sometimes the wind bellows through the tent, threatening to scatter pages and lift the canvas into the blue sky. “Big tings gonna happen right now,” says one of the festival organisers, the novelist Kwame Dawes. The range of speakers is diverse. Junot Díaz, a small figure in black spectacles and an adolescent goatee, reads a sexually charged passage from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He is a little too theatrical for my liking. But the audience cheers and laughs.

***

Women in lime green bathing suits saunter past and children toddle happily. It is Saturday morning, and the first speaker is Staceyann Chin. Tall, elegant, strikingly beautiful, she reads a passage from her memoir about growing up in Jamaica, her hair fanning out behind her. She is a fiery lesbian activist: her chosen passage is about her first menstruation. Her description of misapplying her sanitary towel brings tears (of pain and laughter) to my eyes.

***

It is 11 am, and after Chin is Edward Seaga, an ex-prime minister of Jamaica. “If you want to hide something from Jamaicans, put it in a book,” he jokes. He is nearing 80, and a chorus of Happy Birthdays breaks out. He talks, mostly, about himself.

Following him (thankfully) is the iconoclast Anthony Winkler, a spindly fellow in a pale orange short-sleeved shirt who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He reads two short stories. The first concerns a prostitute who attends to the needs of a boys’ boarding school. It is called “Greasy Legs”.

***

”This is the ultimate festival,” says Pico Iyer, “where art and nature meet”. In this century, “we have the chance to create ourselves”. Iyer believes nationality to be an ongoing process – he has spent 21 years in Japan, and thinks of himself as Japanese – despite barely speaking the language.

Iyer once spent two weeks living in Los Angeles Airport. He thought it was the global city in miniature – everybody sharing a common space, while tragedy took place all around. It is a terminus of dreams, the future coming into light and life. I am not sure the same could be said of Gatwick, which is certainly not a terminus of my dreams, or, I should hope, anyone’s, unless they involve buying slightly cheaper designer clothing while eating junk food; but I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Cuba has sparked Iyer’s interest. He tells a poignant story. A Cuban man begs Iyer to take a letter to his brother – who, he says, is living in America, in a huge house with lots of people to look after him. Iyer does so, expecting no reply; then a week later, one arrives. The brother is in prison, the huge house is San Quentin and the people looking after him are warders. He writes, “Stay in Cuba”. “The world is knitted together by MTV and McDonald’s, but we still cannot understand each other,” says Iyer.

***

Open mic sessions usually fill me with dread. I have never willingly attended one. At Calabash, there were several, and they were marvellous. One in particular moved me enormously. Miss Sarah, in a black dress with red flowers, her best hat, her pearls, was a patient in a hospital for the mentally ill. She and some others had written a poem together. She stood at the mic and read: “I’m on the outside, looking out.” The audience erupted.

***

The Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden, whose new book, Through Black Spruce, is just published here by Weidenfeld, has a way with the audience. He teaches them moose calls. Young cow in oestrus – or “horny young cow” – is a series of plaintive bellows. The bull cow, on the other hand, is short, brutal, inattentive, more like a cough. He soon has the audience doing it in call and response.

***

After a boat ride up the Black River (it is actually black, like shimmering oil), my trainers are wet through. Rummaging through my suitcase, my heart sinks. I spend the rest of the festival, in 30 degrees celsius, walking around in pointy, highly polished loafers, more suited to lounging about cocktail bars than pounding on beaches and rocks. One of the festival organisers walks past me. “He must be a journalist,” he says to his friend. “Look at his shoes.”

***

It is late in the evening. I slip up to Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate in America from 1997 to 2000. “Will you recite your abecedarian poem?” (I wish I had said abecedarian. Did I hell.) And he does, in the half-dark, his voice rich and mellow. The poem starts “Any body can die...” It’s a good exercise. Try it.

***

Patrick French, the biographer of V S Naipaul, is thrilled by Jamaica. “The street names! Sir Florizel Glasspole Highway! Bashment Granny II! I mean, there’ll be a Bashment Granny III, right?” The sun sets behind him as he reads: first an amusing, yet tragic account of the writer’s squabbling family in Trinidad; and then a moving scene where the ashes of Naipaul’s wife Pat are spread in a forest. With the sea as backdrop to the speakers, it sometimes looks as if they are not quite real, as if there is a halo around them. There aren’t many festivals that have this touch of magic.

***

I close with this, which originates in Jamaica: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.”

Philip Womack's second novel, The Liberators, is published by Bloomsbury